by Hal Clement
The climb bore some resemblance to a scientific experiment, in that its completion eliminated both of the hypotheses and left them completely without ideas for a moment. It was only for a moment however; as the two loomed up beside the small fire, which had quite obviously been laid by intelligent hands, a shout sounded from the next hilltop, three hundred yards away.
“John! Nancy! Where did you come from?” The startled investigators recognized simultaneously the voice of Oliver and the fact that they had been a little hasty in eliminating possibilities; obviously they had missed a trail, since neither Oliver nor Dorothy could fly. Neither said anything about it aloud; each decided in private that the different vegetation of the area was responsible.
When Oliver and his companion came back to the fire from the separate hilltops to which they had taken on sighting John’s torch, it quickly transpired that they, too, had seen the light of the volcano and come to investigate it. Their adventures had been very similar to those of John and Nancy, except that neither of them had tried hiding in raindrops. Oliver and Dorothy had been an hour or so ahead of the others, and had found a good supply of fuel, so they were well set for the night.
“I’ll bet Jim and Jane will be with us before the night’s over,” remarked Nancy when both parties had completed their exchange of information. “Their search areas were even closer to this place than yours, Oliver, and unless they went ’way off course coming across country they must have seen the big light, too.”
“Maybe they thought it was better to stick to their assigned job,” remarked John.
“Isn’t investigating bright lights part of the job?” retorted his partner. “Personally, if they’re not here in an hour or two I’m going to start worrying about them. This fire-hill couldn’t possibly be missed or ignored, and you know it.”
No one had a suitable answer for this, but no one was really impressed by the reasoning, since they had all spent some time in discussion before coming to check the mountain. At any rate, the hours passed without the predicted appearance. If Nancy was worrying, she failed to show it; certainly none of the others were. It was a very quiet night, and there was nothing to worry about. The hours were passing, but that was normal; the light was getting brighter, but there was the peculiar hill to account for that; the rain was decreasing, but the hill might account for that, too. The fire was using up its fuel with unusual speed, but there was plenty of fuel. Doubtless the wind was responsible—none of them had ever experienced such a wind, and an air current one could actually feel would no doubt do many queer things. The four explorers stood by their fire and dozed, while the wind grew fiercer.
TO BE CONCLUDED
CLOSE TO CRITICAL
Conclusion. Some problems are inherently of such a nature that cooperation must be accepted, willy-nilly, because neither individual—or group—can do it alone. It may be rescuing a spaceship . . . or even something seemingly simple9 like just talking. . . .
SYNOPSIS
The planet Tenebra, circling the star Altair some sixteen light-years from the Solar system, has presented a major research problem. Its diameter and surface gravity are approximately three times those of Earth. Its temperature in the equatorial regions runs between three hundred seventy and three hundred eighty degrees Centigrade. Since its escape velocity permitted it to retain originally an amount of water per square mile about equal to that of Earth, the surface atmospheric pressure is about eight hundred times Earth normal. The atmosphere consists principally of water, laced with the biological by-products nitrogen, free oxygen, and, in this rather unusual case, oxides of sulfur. It is an even more corrosive environment than that of Earth; in spite of the general acidity, the silicate surface rocks of the planet dissolve so rapidly that the crust is in a constant state of isostatic imbalance, and earthquakes are practically continuous.
After much engineering effort, a remote-controlled robot is designed and built capable of operating on Tenebra, and is successfully lowered to the surface. It explores for months, and finally achieves its intended purpose of locating a more or less intelligent indigenous race. The creatures appear to be in a stone-age culture, though only brief observations of them are made at first; when they are found to be egg-layers, the operators of the robot steal ten of their eggs, carry them to an isolated and uninhabited area, hatch them, and bring up the young creatures with the plan of educating them as go-betweens in the planned human-Tenebran activities of the future.
The story actually opens as this project is about to get under way. The kidnaped natives have been educated for some sixteen years, and are presumed ready for work, though judging by their size they are not yet adult. They do not know their own background, but regard themselves as “Fagin’s people,” some humorist among the human operators having taught them to call the robot FAGIN. A vessel patterned after the ancient bathyscaphe is practically completed, ready to carry human explorers in person to Tenebra’s surface. Two political officers have come to the Vindemiatrix, the robot’s “mother ship,” to watch the start of the contact operation.
These officers are Councilor RICH, a human being, and Councilor AMINADABARLEE, a native of Dromm in the Eta Cassiopeia system. Both have brought members of their families, regarding the trip as little more than a routine affair, to be combined with a vacation if possible. The families are ELISE—“EASY” Rich, twelve-year-old daughter of the human officer, and AMINADORNELDO, son of the Drommian. The latter is physically as large as his father, but is actually about the equivalent of a human seven-year-old.
On the planet’s surface, one of the students has been sent out exploring, deliberately, in a direction likely to bring him into contact with his parent tribe. The student, NICK CHOPPER, does find the cave dwellers, learns their language after a fashion, and both shows and tells them some of the things he has learned from his teacher “back home”—the use of fire, the keeping of domestic animals, and such items. The leader of the cave tribe, SWIFT, has his cupidity aroused, and orders Nick to bring Fagin to the cave village. Nick agrees to do this provided the teacher agrees; Swift, a complete autocrat, takes violent exception to the condition mentioned and starts uttering threats. Nick becomes afraid for the safety of his fellows, and takes the unprecedented step of escaping from the cave village by night.
At night—Tenebra’s rotation period is nearly a hundred hours—enough heat is radiated from the upper layers of the atmosphere to allow it to shift into the liquid phase. This liquid water is enough denser than the still gaseous oxygen for separation to occur, and eventually huge raindrops reach the surface which contain only the truly dissolved oxygen. This is insufficient for active animals, and most Tenebran animal life collapses into more or less suspended animation when struck by one of the “clear” drops which fall after the first few hours of night. Nick is no exception to this rule; but he finds that by carrying torches he can see to avoid the drops and remain in breathable air. He starts his journey, failing to realize that Swift would cheerfully have let him escape even by daylight so that the cave dwellers could follow him back to Vagin’s village. Nick reaches home and reports to his teacher. The human beings realize the situation, but before they can form any plan of action Swift and his people attack. HELVEN RAEKER, the ecologist in charge of surface activities, watches helplessly while two of his pupils are killed and the village captured. Swift, in spite of the language problem, makes his wishes known to the robot operators; the machine has to go back to the cave village with him, or Swift will use fire on it. Since the destruction of the robot would wreck the entire project—even if another were built, it would take years to locate this particular area again on huge, unmapped, practically featureless Tenebra—the human beings have no choice.
Nick and the other survivors, contemptuously left behind, move their herd and personal belongings away from the village. They plan to rescue Fagin, and want a base of operations unknown to the cave dwellers. They find a site on a peninsula projecting into a sea to the east of the old village, a
nd set up a camp; unfortunately, no one stops to think what may happen to the sea level at night.
On the Vindemiatrix the two children have been taken on a sightseeing tour by a crewman. This trip includes a visit to the practically completed bathyscaphe, orbiting just above Tenebrous atmosphere. Failing to realize that Aminadorneldo is not an adult, the guide allows them to enter the ship unattended, and remains in the shuttle rocket which brought them from the Vindemiatrix. Raeker, Rich, and Aminadabarlee discover this during a radio conversation with the man; the Drommian becomes virtually hysterical as he points out the “stupid error,” and his anxiety is transmitted too well.
In his haste to get back to the children, the crewman makes the error of touching the bathyscaphe’s hull while still in contact with that of the tender; the potential difference is enough to set up a sneak-circuit which fires a set of the bathyscaphe’s booster rockets—outboard attachments designed to get the ship into an entry orbit when the time came. The crewman is kicked onto one indeterminable vector and lost; the ship onto another.
Easy is able to report on the ’scaphe’s radio, but before another shuttle can be readied and taken across the hundred and sixty thousand miles between Vindemiatrix and planet, her ship has entered atmosphere and is no longer interceptible. The elder Drommian can hardly find words to express his opinion of human stupidity; Raeker points out that the ship was made for just such a trip, is perfectly capable of getting down to atmospheric speed under automatic control, and once down has electrolysis apparatus able to get hydrogen from Tenebra’s atmosphere to fill its buoyancy cells and get back to where rockets will work and an interception be managed. The politicians do feel better for a while, after the ship succeeds in landing after a rough descent. Its automatic pilot, energized by Easy on careful instructions from the Vindemiatrix’s engineers, has brought it down somewhere near the robot, though no one can tell just how near.
At first no one cares, since it is presumed that the ship can take off again unaided; but when the girl, under the engineers’ directions, closes the switches of the electrolyzers, they draw no current.
Nick and his friends are overwhelmed by the rising sea during their first night at the new camp, and collapse into the usual torpor of Tenebran animal life; during the night, some unknown creatures in the sea devour some of the herd, though they leave the pupils unharmed. Getting an idea from this, Nick leaves orders with his friends to move the camp to a safer place while he himself goes to rescue Fagin. His plan is to decoy the cave dwellers into pursuing the robot into the sea, where they will be anaesthetized. Nick knows that the robot does not have the normal need for oxygen and can escape from such a situation. His plan is partly successful; he gets the robot away and covers their trail by setting a wide brush fire, but the pursuers recover the track too soon and the fugitives are forced to escape them by crossing a river—the robot carrying Nick’s unconscious form across the bottom of the stream. The robot is free, but unfortunately so are the cave dwellers.
On the Vindemiatrix, it is assumed that one or more open inspection ports of the bathyscaphe have allowed Tenebran atmosphere to damage some of the electrolysis wiring. Raeker can see no alternative to having his pupils find the downed vessel and teach them to make the repairs. This looks feasible enough, though after a few days Easy reports that the ’scaphe is no longer floating motionless on a lake; it seems, during the night, to be drifting downstream. Aminadabarlee is alternately blowing hot and cold—usually cold. Rich is being forced to use all his diplomatic ability to keep the creature from persuading his fellows to abandon all contact with the “uncivilized, heartless, careless,” human beings; interstellar trade being what it is, such a breach could be as disastrous as a full-scale war. Raeker, irritated by the Drommian’s words and manner, reacts in a way which does not make Rich’s task any easier. It begins to appear that more than the lives of the children may depend on a successful rescue.
Nick and the robot get back to their fellows. While the situation is being discussed, the group is found by a scout of Swift’s; but they see and capture the scout. Raeker, working through the robot tries to get back to the original plan of working with Tenebra’s natives; he gives the scout a message for Swift telling of the grounded bathyscaphe, the need for finding it, and the advantages accruing to Swift and his people if it is saved. He also tells of the drifting of the machine the preceding night—and incidentally, gives his pupils a better idea of the whole situation than they have gleaned in sixteen years. The scout agrees to deliver the message, and leaves. Raeker, not fully trusting Swift, immediately organizes his people for a search independent of Swift; Aminadabarlee, discovering for the first time that the human beings are depending on the “ignorant savages” of Tenebra to rescue his son, goes into another tantrum, from which he is brought with difficulty by Raeker, Easy, and his own son. Raeker’s plan is put into operation in spite of the Drommian; three pairs of students go out searching, leaving Nick and a companion to watch the camp and wait for Swift’s answer, if any.
The children spend the time describing the animal life around the once more stranded bathyscaphe.
Two of the exploring teams spot a light which they suppose may be the downed ship, but when they reach it they find an active volcano—something wholly outside their education and experience. They camp near it, planning to search their assigned areas before reporting this new development to Fagin; they attach little importance to the peculiar behavior of the rain and the unheard-of hurricane of fully two knots which they are experiencing near the mountain.
PART 3
IX
“DADDY! Dr. Raeker! ’Mina’s right; it’s Nick!” Easy’s voice was close to hysteria. The men glanced at each other, worried frowns on their faces. Rich gestured that Raeker should do the answering, but his expression pleaded eloquently for care. Raeker nodded, and closed his own microphone switch.
“Are you sure it’s actually Nick, Easy?” he asked in as matter-of-fact a voice as he could manage. “He’s supposed to have stayed at the camp, you know. There are six others actually searching, supposedly in pairs; do you see two of them, there?”
“No,” replied Easy in a much calmer voice. Her father sank back in his chair with a thankful expression on his face. “There was only one, and I saw him just for a second. Wait—there he is again.” Raeker wished he could see the girl’s face, but she was shouting her messages from one of the observing chambers and was well out of pickup range of the vision transmitter. “I can still see only one of them, and he’s mostly hidden in the bushes—just his head and shoulders, if you can call them that, sticking up. He’s coming closer now. He must see the ’scaphe, though I can’t tell where he’s looking, or what he’s looking with. I’m not sure whether he’s the same size, but he certainly is the same shape. I don’t see how you’d ever tell them apart.”
“It isn’t easy,” replied Raeker. “After a few years, you find there are differences in their scale and spine arrangements something like the differences in human faces. Maybe you can tell me what this one is wearing and carrying; that should be a lot easier to describe.”
“All right. He has a sort of haversack slung over what would be his right hip if he had any hips; it’s held by a strap running up around the other side of his body, over the arms on the left. The front of the sack has a knife hanging from it, and I think there’s another on a sort of complex strap arrangement on the other side, but he’s been working toward us at an angle and we haven’t had a good look at that side. He’s carrying four spears that look just like the ones Nick and his people had, and-“the more I see of him the more he looks like them.”
“Does he have an ax, or anything looking like one?” asked Raeker.
“If he has, it’s hanging from his straps at the left rear, where we can’t see it.”
“Then I’m afraid you’re going to have to make good on your claim that you can get on all right with Swift’s people. Mine carry only two spears, and the search teams took their
axes with them. If that were one of our searchers, he’d have an ax in one of his left hands, almost certainly. That means we’ll have to change our plans a bit; we were hoping our folks would find you first. That’s just luck;
I suppose this is some hunter of Swift’s. They’d hardly have had time to get an organized search going, even if he decided to run one on his own.”
“Isn’t it going to be a long time before any of your search teams get back to the camp?” asked Easy after some seconds of thought.
“I’m afraid so; over a week of our time. Swift’s answer should be back to Nick before then, though.”
“I wish the time didn’t stretch out so on this darned four-days-for-one world. Didn’t I hear you say you’d learned a little of Swift’s language during the time he had the robot at his caves?”
“We did. Not very much, though; it’s extremely hard for a human being to pronounce. We recorded a lot of it; we can give you the sounds, and as much as we could get of the meaning, if you think it will be any help. It’ll help time to pass anyway.”
